Thursday, March 12, 2015

Sometimes you have to garden, or if you are in the frozen north in March, you think, read and dream about gardening. The seed companies know this and send out catalogs to arrive during blizzards.

I like perennials, or annuals & biennials that reseed themselves. Generally this means heirlooms as modern hybrids don't necessarily breed true. In my Interweb wanderings for perennial herbs & veggies I came across a site suggesting I could perennially grow veggies from kitchen scraps. Hey, I wasn't born yesterday, I've sprouted an avocado pit, or a green potato, and been semi successful with pineapples before. Fun, but hardly useful. The only thing I've been 100% successful growing from kitchen scraps is mold....

However, I'm always on the lookout for some tidbit of trivia that might prove useful or entertaining, so I took a look and got taken to school.

The first site was a couple coeds blogging about growing scallions, they'd seen the idea elsewhere and gave it a try. The basic process is to only use the greens of your store bought scallions, stick the roots & whites in water to grow more greens. OK, slightly useful, but I like to use the whites too. Then a little light bulb came on, and I realized a cup of water on the window sill would probably let me keep my scallions fresher, perhaps indefinitely. We generally stick em in the fridge in the plastic bag we bought em in, use a few then forget them. I hate finding them spoiled, sometimes I find more than one partial bunch in there. Waste and Inefficiency- my two biggest pet peeves. It works well by the way, have a few in a glass on the sill as I type. Roots are growing, greens are growing- they are advancing instead of declining like they would in my fridge. Woo Hoo!

Hmmm, one page got me one tidbit, so I searched some more. Turns out there are more useful edible things people claim you can grow from veggie parts you'd throw away anyway- new celery from the bottom of the stalk (looks promising, mine is sprouting), cabbage, lettuce, broccoli(?), maybe even mushrooms. That's in addition to the old standby potato/avocado/pineapple routine. Neat hing I see there is I'll (eventually) end up growing at the same pace we consume at. Lets face it, if I buy a pack of celery seeds I'll plant all 25 or 250 seeds and never want to see celery again. If I grow another plant every time we use a stalk, we'll end up with a staggered harvest that pretty much matches our rate of consumption- I think.